A humbling week..

Not that every week (day) isn't somewhat humbling, but this week has been especially so.  Working with my podcasting partner at Central (who is so on her game and hip with all the new apps) to my visits to a bunch of different sites nominated for the "eddie" awards, to watching some of the great Camtasia videos produced for training by JL, it's been a week of watching others who are much more adept at integrating technology.  It was fun, mind you.  I said humbling, not depressing.  But still, it seems a guy could search forever to find the best tools to promote learning and then they'd just invent a dozen new apps (or a web 4.0) and he'd have to start all over.  

So I spent my week working on the Camtasia/PPT and CPS/PPT (making it a CPS/PPT/Camtasia) project.  I basically took a powerpoint lesson on sentence structure and camtasia'd the animations and voice-overs which resulted in a few short movies on the subject.  In camtasia, I cleaned up a couple problems and added highlighting in a few places to emphasize points.  Then, in CPS, I launched the ppt with the question bar on the bottom.  After each short video, I had them respond to questions, and then we moved on to the next section of the video, etc, etc.  I used a lot of visual humor to try to make some of the points, and also hoped that the rolling motion of a video presentation would hold attention and feel stimulating and familiar to the kids.  I wanted the stop/question session to be kind of sudden and shocking - like if a tv show or movie suddently stopped and addressed the audience.  I'm not sure that the video segment was narrative enough for that.  I mean, it did definitely hold their attention better than I do when I present the rules of sentence structure with notes or orally.  But, I don't know...  

And, the data goon inside of me says - "You don't know because you didn't set up any reliable measurement device.  In typical technowonk style, you ran ahead and tried something but didn't think in advance about how to measure it.  i.e. pre-event measurements of student engagement with the introduction to materials, score-based measurement on the pre-post lesson learning, narrative feedback on student enjoyment/engagement..."  Oh well.  Live and learn.  Gotta go.